The Weekend That Was

On Saturday night, director and minor VERGE hero Kevin Smith boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank. He was kicked off for being too fat. What followed was all out war, launched on his twitter account, podcast) and blog. Southwest fired back on their own twitter feed (which has roughly 600,000 fewer followers) and Smith then scorched them for what felt like 36 hours straight. The actual blogs of actual newspapers used actual paid man-hours to compile stories like this one, reminding us of that time in 2008 when Smith admitted to breaking a toilet by sitting on it. (All the warning signs were there! Could this tragedy have been averted?) It all culminated in this blog post in which Smith lamented that "I’m going to carry this Too Fat To Fly shit around for the rest of my life like herpes."

The "fatgate" dust-up was entertaining. But let’s be honest: Smith, by his own admission, is a "lardo". And Southwest, by very definition, is a soulless corporation. What interested us was this as an example of These Times We Live In, in which a director who hasn’t made a good movie since the late ’90s can mobilize an army of 1.6 million followers to cause a major airline the kind of headaches usually reserved for a pilot strike or a wholesale equipment malfunction.

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Might this have all been deliberately inflamed because Smith has his movie Cop Out coming this Friday? Absolutely. But we choose to view this as a prime example of the internet-as-ultimate-American-medium: One that elevates the individual at expense of the group. Sometimes even for the better.

We can’t mock the impulse that brought more than 80 of last week’s most famous musician-esque performers—from T-Pain to Josh Groban, from Jeff Bridges to the spliced-in digital spectre of Michael Jackson—together in an L.A. recording studio to update USA For Africa’s 1985 benefit-jam "We Are the World" as a plea for Haiti relief. So we really want to give everyone involved with "We Are The World 25 For Haiti," which premiered on Friday, the benefit of the doubt with regard to their intentions. We want to ignore the cognitive dissonance of a "check your egos at the door" project that is filmed "by Academy Award winning director Paul Haggis," and block out the memory of the countless terrible post-W.A.T.W. charity singles that made the spectacle of celebrities trying to "raise awareness" of some cause or other by holding one headphone to their ears and emoting super-hard seem inherently ridiculous. We will not even make fun of Kanye for showing up in a bling-encrusted flannel, or of the fact that a pop-up window appeared about halfway through the clip when we watched it on YouTube, urging us to "upload your own version of We Are The World by posting a response to this video," an act which, as pitchin’-in goes, ranks somewhere close to "baking a cake decorated to resemble the Haitian flag and serving it to guests" on the relief-efficacy scale.

No. We will, however, say this, to Jamie Foxx: Sir, there are times when it’s appropriate to crack everyone up with your amazing Ray Charles impersonation. The 2004 Oscars, for example. We know, we know—it’s kind of your thing. But perhaps this would have been a good time to keep Brother Ray in the box, instead of doing the voice, and then laughing about it, and then giving Jennifer Hudson that playful little shoulder-shove, as if to say, "Laughter is the best medicine, am I right? Unless your homeland has been ravaged by an earthquake and you’re suffering from a horrible infection. In which case antibiotics are probably the best medicine. Whatchoo say!"

Oh, and speaking of things for which there is a time and a place—hey, famous people? A thought. The next time you get that "certain call" to gather together and sing from your hearts in hopes of stirring the hearts of others to action? Maybe dial back the fucking AutoTune just a little. We know it’s sort of the industry standard—and that nobody wants to hit a bum note in front of that pitch-fascist Randy Jackson—but nothing does not say "empathy" like running your voice through a digital note-correction algorithm that turns your every melisma into the wheeze of an emphysemic Transformer.

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YOU WEREN’T THE ONLY ONE DRAGGED TO THAT TERRIBLE GARY MARSHALL ROMANTIC COMEDY**

If you’re our age, you no doubt remember this absolutely classic HBO trailer that played before every movie that ran. (And that amazing trick where if you put the cable box one station above the Playboy channel and put the TV on channel two, you got VERY wavy naked people.) Anyway, here’s how they made it.